Electronic commerce is everywhere now. People are using the Internet, as well as other remotely accessible locations, such as kiosks, to order goods and/or services. Some of these services require verification of prior payment and/or reservations at the time the service is being offered which typically is sometime after the actual purchase (or reservation) was made. For example, assume a person desires to reserve a seat on an airplane, or a room in a hotel, or a rental car, or a seat in a theatre, all from a remote terminal. Typically, that person would get into communication contact with a reservation system. This communication can be with a live person at the selling end or could be with a computer acting in an interactive mode or a combination of the two. The reservation would be made and arrangements would be made to pay for the reservation. Then the problem arises; how does the purchaser demonstrate to the gatekeeper at the airline (or to the rental car gatekeeper; or to the theatre usher) that the service has been paid for?
The obvious answer is that a ticket, or other indicia of the transaction, is printed at the purchaser""s terminal and that printed ticket is used to identify that the services have been paid for. That might work when the paper stock that the receipt information is printed on is closely guarded and very distinctive. It will not work for obvious reasons where general purpose printers are used to print the receipt at the purchaser""s premises.
If electronic commerce is to flourish then it is mandatory to have an arrangement whereby the purchaser can obtain immediately upon purchase a printed verification of the transaction in a manner which allows for universal printing while still allowing the printed receipt to act as a final verification of authenticity at the point where the actual services are rendered.
These and other objects, features and technical advantages of my invention have been achieved in one embodiment where a system and method is utilized for establishing a commercially available partially preprinted form where the form has printed on it information used by the service seller during the initial transaction communication period for establishing integrity control for subsequent verification. In one embodiment, the form is available to any purchaser for use with any general purpose printer operable in conjunction with a PC or other communication/computing device, including so called xe2x80x9cdumbxe2x80x9d terminals. This form is advantageously preprinted with both human readable data and machine readable data. As will be seen, the machine readable data, which I will call an indicia, contains key information which serves to help decode material that is subsequently printed on the form under control of the central validating system.
In operation, the purchaser enters into an interaction communication with the seller of the service. This may be, by way of illustration, from the purchaser""s PC at his/her home via the Internet to a web site maintained by the seller. The user has obtained one or more preprinted paper forms from a supplier of forms. The weight of the paper is not critical and the forms may be any weight stock. The user inputs the human readable data from the exact preprinted form that the user intends to use. This input can be by verbally reading the data or by scanning the data or by any other system. In situations when there is no human readable material preprinted on the form, the user would scan in the machine readable portion. Some portion of the preprinted data is unique to the exact form selected by the user at that time.
The seller, upon receipt of the unique data from the user pertaining to the selected form, verifies that this exact form identification number has not been previously used. Since each preprinted form has a unique identification code, this initial screening process insures that a copy of the preprinted form is not being used. The seller then uses the unique identification number to establish an encryption code for printing on the form a machine readable security indicia. It will be this security indicia that will subsequently be used in conjunction with the original preprinted indicia to verify the authenticity of the information to be printed on the form. The seller then sends information to user so that the user""s printer will print on the form all of the information that will be used by the purchaser to subsequently obtain the service.
When the purchaser arrives at the location where the services are to be rendered (in our example, at the airport) the purchaser""s form will contain luggage labels (printed when the security indicia was printed) and a boarding pass. A receipt will also be printed at the time the security indicia was printed. The boarding pass contains all of the information necessary to properly route the luggage to the final destination. This routing information may be both human readable and mechanically readable, perhaps in several different formats.
For verification of the authenticity of the boarding pass and/or the luggage tags, the original preprinted indicia is read to obtain a decryption key. This key is then used to decrypt information stored in the security indicia that was printed at the time the remainder of the form information was printed. If the key is not present on the preprinted form, or if the key differs from the key assigned to that form in conjunction with the human readable data that was inputted by the purchaser during the initial payment and/or scheduling session, then the data on the form will not be verified and the holder of the form (boarding pass) will be denied service.
Note that the printer can be any printing device for creating images on paper, or it could be a device for storing images which can later be displayed to obtain the goods and or services. For example, the image can be created into a memory and that memory can be later used to create a display, or to print a paper or other media copy, which is scanned or observed by a gatekeeper at the point where the services are to be rendered. The recreated image can be electronically scanned using the preestablished key to decode the newly created validity information. Such a system can be useful when a memory device, such as a smart card or PC, is used to gain access to a theatre, to rent a car or to board an airplane. In such a system, the memory device interacts with the seller of the service at an earlier point in time, usually several days or weeks earlier, and during that interaction availability of the service is confirmed, a reservation is made, payment is arranged for, seat assignments issued, and images (or other forms of data) are recorded in the memory in a manner such that such images will not be verifiable unless they are decoded using some portion of the preestablished memory data.
The foregoing has outlined rather broadly the features and technical advantages of the present invention in order that the detailed description of the invention that follows may be better understood. Additional features and advantages of the invention will be described hereinafter which form the subject of the claims of the invention. It should be appreciated by those skilled in the art that the conception and specific embodiment disclosed may be readily utilized as a basis for modifying or designing other structures for carrying out the same purposes of the present invention. It should also be realized by those skilled in the art that such equivalent constructions do not depart from the spirit and scope of the invention as set forth in the appended claims.